I have a love/hate relationship with porn. On the love side, I consume it regularly. It’s my favorite masturbation accompaniment – I prefer it to fantasy infinitely. Well, that’s not quite right: fantasy plays a huge part in my life – it’s just not how I bring myself off when I’m rubbing my cock. That’s how I use porn. And not just when jerking off – also as a sort of idle leisure-time activity.

On the hate side? The vast majority of porn not only doesn’t arouse me – it actively turns me off. There’s almost no porn (other than, as I’ve written, X-Art, Amateur Allure, and the “OnlyAllSites” suite of web sites) that resonates for me, and, the way I’m wired, I’m constantly in touch with the portion of my reaction to anything (including/especially that which I find most satisfying) that’s disappointed. So herewith – a review of the porn I dislike least. A healthier person might manage to present this as a review of the porn I like most, but hey – that would be another dude’s blog.

To start: X-Art (my current favorite) features no dialogue, no ability to connect with the characters, and too little in the way of real-life encounters. I crave seeing these people dressed, walking around, interacting with other people, in the world. And more clothed foreplay! What it presents – beautiful people having hot, and occasionally tender, but never rough, sex – it does phenomenally well. But nothing other than that.

And Amateur Allure similarly is great for what it is, but all it is is the same thing, over and over and over. Why not show different interactions (if you haven’t seen it – the conceit is endless repetition of one interaction: woman sees web site, wants to appear, is interviewed by invisible-but-for-cock guy, confesses her love for cock-sucking, confesses her love for or enthusiasm for trying semen-swallowing, confesses her enjoyment of fucking, tells when she first sucked cock, tells when she first swallowed, then proffers her hand and kneels, sucks cock, fucks, sucks cock, swallows cum)? The women are hot. Their eyes always are iridescent – something about the lighting. They’re always dressed in slightly overly formal dresses. And they’re always 18-25, with the very occasional positive outlier. But why not some variety in structure? Also, the actual blowjobs vary very little: there’s always one with her kneeling, him standing, and then one in 69 position. No face-fucking, nothing rough, rarely even anything all that creative within the constraints described. A few more male models might help with this: “Tom” – the protagonist of the site – has a very specific taste, and it’s not quite mine. It’s great for him, but not for a viewer who craves either something different or difference in and of itself.

OnlyAllSites also is great for what it is: endless softcore presentations of British women, of various ages and body types (within the very narrow range of “height/weight proportionate), in and out of a variety of clothes across a few focused sites –onlytease, onlyopaques, onlysecretary, onlysilkandsatin. I love that shit, and eat it up. But there’s no sexual component to it – it’s purely an aesthetic presentation of beauty, clothed and unclothed. There’s not even a hint of the fact that these are sexual beings, other than that they have secondary (and occasionally primary) sexual characteristics.

There are a few other sites and films that I’ve come across over the years that resonate more or less for me: IFeelMyself – a site devoted to female masturbation – is incredibly hot, and feels very real. But first off, there’s no sex (except very occasional lesbian sex) on the site, and second, it’s almost antiseptic in its presentation of arousal – the women don’t reveal anything of their personalities, and are doing nothing other than preparing to masturbate, masturbating, cumming, and (briefly) relaxing afterward. They don’t interact with other humans, or with the viewers, other than simply as the observed object. This leaves me hungry.

And they have a sister site – BeautifulAgony – which is even more specific – just the faces of women and men in the throes of orgasm. It’s hot, but has the feel more of an art project than of porn.

There are a host of sites that present attractive, always very young, women, in various stages of deshabille – Nubiles.net (has some explicit fucking too), Met-Art, FTV Girls(which has a particular thing for public exposure and vegetable- and other large-object-fucking). Each of these has something I like, and more I don’t.

There used to be a site – I think it was called “CaliforniaPimp” – that had an incredibly compelling conceit for me. The idea was this: guy puts an ad in a newspaper seeking “calendar models,” and then persuades them to suck him off as part of the audition. Only it turns out, there is no calendar. What I hated about the site was its conceptual sadism – the conceit was that he was taking advantage of women (even if, in practice, they all were models who knew full well what was happening and who were performing). What I loved about it? The open-endedness of it, the seeming lack of over-determination – sometimes it took longer, sometimes less long, and sometimes even rejection. And the acting was good enough that I still find myself wondering if it really was acting, whether there wasn’t a bit of actual sadism in it.

Playboy TV has a series called FourSome. Four single people, two men, two women, in a house for a weekend. They’ve never met, and they’re all sexually adventurous, up for whatever. If it didn’t skew toward the superficial 20-somethings with silicone breasts and chiseled abs you would expect Playboy TV to skew toward, it might be better. But still… it’s pretty hot: these people go from not knowing one another to fucking, and that journey – presented credibly – is what’s hottest for me.

I love seeing people decide to have sex even more than I like seeing them have sex. If there were a FourSome by, say, PBS, or A&E, or something – if participants were selected by essay competition rather than interviews with Playboy casters – if the first activity were a discussion of a book, or film, or story, or something, rather than eating sushi off a naked hostess – now that would be a good show.

I think my reaction to FourSome gets at what I really crave – and what’s ultimately completely unavailable (best I can tell) in the world of porn: a realistic presentation of people’s decision to fuck one another – and then their implementation of that decision – that results from a primarily intellectual, but also emotional, and sexual connection.

[…] I like images and videos of people having sex. I like seeing people come. But as I’ve written elsewhere, there’s very little of mainstream porn, of feature-length porn, that appeals to me. Like every […]